From the Magazine

The Making of The Producers

Starting with just a title, Springtime for Hitler, TV comedy genius
Mel Brooks wrote and directed The Producers as his shot at Hollywood. But the film got
buried at the box office, only to become a cult classic, resurfacing 33 years
later as a Broadway smash. Sam Kashner captures the insanity faced by two colorful
real-life producers, Sidney Glazier and Joseph E. Levine, Brooks’s clash
with star Zero Mostel, and dozens of Führers causing a furor at Rockefeller Center.

The Producers, one of the most lauded and successful Broadway musicals in recent memory, began life 36 years ago as a movie that got queasy reviews and quickly sank at the box office. It was the brainchild of the comic genius Mel Brooks, but it couldn’t have been made without the efforts of larger-than-life producers Sidney Glazier and Joseph E. Levine, and a collection of singularly talented New Yorkers who were, for the most part, flying by the seat of their pants. Alfa-Betty Olsen, a writer and performer who worked closely with Brooks and cast the movie, knew that from the beginning. “I used to say to Mel, ‘You know, we’re doing this for the Thalia [an art and revival movie house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side].’ It was really a home movie,” she explains at a corner table at Café Loup in Manhattan. “A very, very small movie with a small budget, done in New York City with all New York people.” What they ended up with was a film, in Olsen’s words, “so unique it exists out of time.”

When it opened, in 1968, the movie got mixed notices, with such words as “vile” and “tasteless” cropping up in the prominent reviews. For one thing, it was considered unthinkable to satirize Hitler only 23 years after the end of World War II. For another, what chance did a send-up of show business—New York, vaudeville, showgirls-with-pretzels-on-their-tits kind of show business—have in the era of Vietnam and student rebellions and acid rock? Not much.

“It started out in life as just a title,” Brooks likes to say: Springtime for Hitler. The phrase leapt to Brooks’s lips during a press conference for a 1962 musical called All American, starring comedian Ray Bolger, for which Brooks had written the book. A reporter yelled, “What are you going to do next?” and Brooks answered, “Springtime for Hitler.” He was just being outrageous, riffing, perhaps, on the title of a forgotten 1931 comedy called Springtime for Henry, but the phrase stuck.

Next came the hero’s name: Leo Bloom. Brooks borrowed it from James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses. “I don’t know what it meant to James Joyce,” Brooks told the theater critic Kenneth Tynan in a 1978 interview for The New Yorker, “but to me Leo Bloom always meant a vulnerable Jew with curly hair.”

Before The Producers was a movie, it was supposed to have been a novel. Thing was, Brooks never thought of himself as a writer until he saw his name in the credits for Sid Caesar’s television comedy series Your Show of Shows. Brooks was one of several sketch writers it employed from 1950 to 1954 (others included Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, and Neil Simon). “I figured I’d better find out what these bastards do,” he said. So he went to the library and took home all the books he could carry: “Conrad, Fielding, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy.” Eventually he realized he wasn’t really a writer, he was a talker. “I wished they’d changed my billing on the show,” he told Tynan, “so that it said ‘Funny Talking by Mel Brooks.’“It was, in fact, that gift for funny talking— improvisation—that made Brooks’s reputation.

Brooks first got into movies with a short called “The Critic,” which took advantage of his genius for comic patter: it consisted of geometric patterns with the running commentary—in voice-over—of a cranky, clueless Jewish guy who wanders into the movie house and doesn’t get it. (“Vat da hell is it? . . . I don’t know much about psych-analysis, but I’d say this was a doity picture.”) It was essentially a filmed comedy routine—and it won Brooks an Oscar for best short film.

Still, Brooks felt that impromptu dialogue and stand-up comedy didn’t have class—writing had class. But when he tried to turn Springtime for Hitler into a novel, it didn’t work. He then tried it as a play, but soon realized that as a movie “it could go places, it wouldn’t have to stay in the office”—the action could spread all over New York. Brooks had found his métier. He was going to make a movie, a real movie, like, well, the way Ed Wood did! Looking back, Brooks says, “I loved that movie Ed Wood,”referring to the 1994 Tim Burton film about the world’s most amateurish auteur. “I bought it and run it all the time. Marty [Martin Landau] is great in it as Bela Lugosi. When he calls Boris Karloff a ‘cocksucker’—I love it! It’s so real. I identify with Ed Wood—that’s me.”

Now he had to write the screenplay. “One day,” Alfa-Betty Olsen remembers, “Mel called up and he had the story. He had the dopey, repressed accountant, and he had [the crooked producer] Max Bialystock.” Olsen, who was raised in a Norwegian neighborhood in Brooklyn, lived on 15th Street in Manhattan then, with a roommate named Candace. Brooks would visit during the long doldrums after Your Show of Shows went off the air, and his salary had plummeted from $5,000 to $85 a week for freelance writing jobs.

It was a bleak period in Brooks’s life. For five years he couldn’t get work. All American had ended its brief run. Jerry Lewis hired him as a screenwriter for The Ladies Man and then fired him. An original screenplay called Marriage Is a Dirty, Rotten Fraud (written as Brooks’s first marriage, to dancer Florence Baum, unraveled) went begging. Brooks was reduced to living in a fourth-floor walk-up on Perry Street in Greenwich Village.

Then, in 1965, his luck changed. With comedy writer Buck Henry, he created Get Smart, the popular secret-agent spoof, for television. That success didn’t fill him with joy, however, because now he feared he would spend his entire career in television. He felt boxed in; he had wanted a life larger than that. Even during the glory years of Your Show of Shows, he had told Sid Caesar, “Enough—let’s do movies!”

The success of Get Smart relieved Brooks of financial worries, but it also highlighted a problem that would become something of a pattern in his career. Buck Henry resented the billing “by Mel Brooks with Buck Henry,” and the two men fell out over it. Henry later said that he had once bet that Mel Brooks’s name would appear five times on the credits of High Anxiety, Brooks’s 1978 parody of Hitchcock’s thrillers.

Once Brooks had the characters and the basic plot, he wrote the treatment and screenplay, with Olsen’s help, in theatrical producer Lore Noto’s West 46th Street office. Noto, who produced the longest-running musical in American history, The Fantasticks, had recently produced one of the shortest-running, a musical version of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel The Yearling, about a boy and his pet fawn; it closed on Broadway after three performances.

“In return for looking after Noto’s mail and things, we had an office, and that’s where we wrote it,” Olsen says. “Lore would come in after lunch, and then, around two o’clock, the phone would ring, and it would be Anne Bancroft,” the elegant, Academy Award—winning actress whom Brooks had married in August 1964. “Anne would get Lore on the phone and ask him, ‘Is my husband there?’ That’s how it went. We also cast the movie out of that office. Everything was kind of makeshift. . . . And it was just so evident that Mel wanted it very much. You could feel him reaching for the brass ring. Writing The Producers was Mel creating himself; he wanted to declare himself on the world.”

When they weren’t in Noto’s office, they continued to write the screenplay out on Fire Island, at Brooks and Bancroft’s house on the beach. They worked in their bathing suits on the deck, with a portable electric typewriter set up on a small table among the folding chairs. Olsen was a good secretary, but more than that, she was a singularly funny woman with a strong background in theater. She had been in on the creation of Get Smart. “I was thrilled, I was in seventh heaven to be working with Mel,” Olsen says. “After all, he had written for Sid Caesar.”

The plot was simple: A seedy, has-been producer (Max Bialystock) finances his shows by romancing and fleecing elderly women. When a timid accountant (Leo Bloom) shows up to do Bialystock’s books, he discovers that a producer can make more money on a flop than on a success, by raising more than the show actually costs to produce and pocketing the left-over lucre. The conniving Bialystock sees the beauty of a simple idea: the I.R.S. never audits a flop, especially if it closes after just one performance. He persuades the neurotic Bloom to go along with his scheme, and they set out to find the worst play ever. They do. It’s Springtime for Hitler, written by a crazed, unreconstructed Nazi (Franz Liebkind) who keeps pigeons and lives in a shabby walk-up in Greenwich Village. To make sure that Liebkind’s play will flop, they hire the most incompetent director they can find, a cross-dressing Busby Berkeley reject (Roger De Bris; bris is the Yiddish word for the circumcision ceremony), and cast a zonked-out hippie on parole to play Hitler (Dick Shawn as Lorenzo St. DuBois, better known as “L.S.D.”). They oversell the show by 25,000 percent, and, in a coup de grâce, Bialystock tries to bribe the New York Times theater critic and succeeds in earning his ire. The show, as expected, is a horror, but the two producers hadn’t counted on the pleasures of satire. The audience, convulsed with laughter, decides that Springtime for Hitler is a comedy and that it will run for years! Bialystock and Bloom are ruined. They have to pay profits to the mass of investors they’d hoped to bilk—an impossibility.

Brooks didn’t have to look far for models for Max Bialystock. He had once worked for “a guy well into his 60s who made love to a different little old lady every afternoon on a leather couch in his office,” and he knew another producer who made his living by producing flops. (Brooks won’t supply their names.) And the Great White Way was full of producers who kept two sets of books. Time magazine suggested that Bialystock was in fact a parody of David Merrick, the cranky, mustachioed producer of Hello, Dolly! and many other hits.

But Brooks says he also looked to him-self: “Max and Leo are me, the ego and id of my personality. Bialystock—tough, scheming, full of ideas, bluster, ambition, wounded pride. And Leo, this magical child.”

It took six years to bring the concept to the screen. Once Brooks had started to make the rounds with his 30-page treatment, he quickly found that all the major studio heads recoiled at the idea of Hitler as a comic figure. It was just too tasteless, too outrageous. So Brooks tried independent producers and found much the same reaction, until a friend set up a meeting at a coffee shop in Manhattan with an independent producer named Sidney Glazier.

“Sidney Glazier was larger than life,” recalls Michael Hertzberg, 63, sitting in his spacious home office, in the Hollywood Hills, surrounded by framed movie stills from films he’s worked on as a director, writer, and producer (including several of Brooks’s movies, as well as Johnny Dangerously and Entrapment). As a young man, Hertzberg was an assistant director on The Producers.

“Sidney was just loud and big,” Hertzberg recalls. “He was more like Bialystock, [but] you’d look into his past and discover he’d already won the Oscar for [the 1965 documentary] The Eleanor Roosevelt Story. He had a huge, huge heart—gigantic. So who took a risk on this crazy man with this crazy thing—Springtime for Hitler? If it wasn’t for Sidney, there would be no Producers, there would be no Broadway show, there would be no nothing.”

Glazier, a handsome, dark-haired man then in his 50s who, like Brooks, had served in the Second World War, was having lunch at the Hello Coffee Shop when Brooks arrived for their first meeting. Glazier recalled that Brooks began by telling jokes, “some of which weren’t too funny, and I was a little uncomfortable.” But then he asked Brooks to read him the treatment, so Mel acted out all the parts with such slapstick bravura that Glazier nearly choked on his lunch. “He’s sitting there, eating his tuna sandwich and drinking black coffee, and I’m reading it to him,” Brooks recalls, ‘and the tuna fish is flying out of his mouth, and the coffee cup gets knocked off the table. And he’s on the floor, and he’s yelling, “We’re gonna make it! I don’t know how, but we’re gonna make this movie!’”

Glazier’s own story was a harrowing one. “Basically, I grew up in an orphanage,” Glazier told journalist Timothy White in a 1997 interview for Billboard, “the Hebrew Orphan Home on Green Lane in Philadelphia, but I didn’t start out in that terrible place. I was put there.” Born in 1916, he was the second of three sons of a Russian-Polish couple from Minsk. When his father, Jake Glazier, died suddenly in the influenza epidemic of 1918, his widow. Sophie, took up with another man, who already had three children. “Basically, this man didn’t care to raise me or my two brothers,” Sidney recalled, “and my mother, in her awful irrationality, decided my brothers and I would be better off in this Orthodox institution. . . . Back then, you were supposed to have no living parents in order to be admitted to an orphan home; years later, we learned that she actually paid to bend the rules. I can still see the glow of the globe-shaped desk lamps on either side of the police chamber where these matters were decided.” He tried to run away from the orphanage and its “constant chill, lousy food, and bare beds,” but had nowhere else to live; he left for good when he was 15.

“My mother let me stay with her second family for just a month, but then I had to go.” Sidney found a job as an usher at the Bijou, a burlesque theater in Philadelphia, “for $9.00 a week”—just enough to rent a room. That’s when he realized that movies were “the loveliest and best escape from the troubled life I inherited.”

Karen Glazier, 38, Sidney’s daughter and a novelist who teaches at Williams College, recently described her father as one who was “proud of overcoming obstacles. His was a Horatio Alger story, a Jewish Dickens story.” She never really thought of him as “a film person,” however. “I always thought of him as being in the fundraising business,” she explains. “He was a genius at raising money, at charming people. . . . He was a very good-looking guy with a big voice who looked good in a suit. Nice shoulders. But he was impossible to live with. My father was married four times, and he demanded huge amounts of attention.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his upbringing, “Sidney battled depression,” says Karen. “He was incredibly manic, he could be incredibly depressed. He might have been bipolar. He moved between self-destructive tendencies and the will to survive.”

Glazier took the screenplay of The Producers to Florida and gave it to his trusted cousin Len Glazer and his wife, Zelda, to read. Len and Zelda’s son, the screen-writer Mitch Glazer (Great Expectations, The Recruit), remembers his father reading the screenplay, which was in a red folder, on their porch in Florida. “He was in hysterics,” Mitch recalls. “But then my mother said, ‘You can’t make this, Sid. It’s completely offensive! You’ve got an Academy Award, you’re on the road to stardom, your career would be ruined!’ But he didn’t listen,” according to Mitch. “He had made up his mind.”

Karen recalls that her father “admired on-your-feet, spontaneous talk. I’m sure that’s what he saw in Mel at first.” But there were other things that attracted him, such as the similarities in their Russian-Jewish backgrounds. For another, Brooks’s father had died suddenly of kidney disease when Mel was two years old. But, unlike Glazier, Brooks had experienced the adoration of his mother and her extended family, even as she worked 10 hours a day during the Depression to support her children. Kenneth Mars, hilarious as the German playwright, Franz Liebkind, in The Producers, said recently that he had once asked Brooks about the key to his success, and Brooks answered, “‘You know, my feet never touched the floor until I was two because they were always passing me around and kissing and hugging me.’ I think that’s a key: the kind of image he has of himself of the evergreen child, the child who brings you fun,” Mars commented.

Glazier had a little company, U-M Productions, Inc., located in both New York and Florida. His partner was Louis Wolfson, who, Brooks recalls, was “a big guy in the stock market. They took me to a horse-racing stable whose big horse was Affirmed [which would later win the Triple Crown, the last to do so], and I acted out all the parts for Louie and the horse.” (Like Bialystock and Bloom, Wolfson would end up going to prison, but his crime was violating securities laws.)

Then, Brooks recalls, “we went to one studio after another. We went to Lew Wasserman at Universal. Wasserman said, ‘I like it, except for one change.’ ‘What’s that, Lew?’ ‘Instead of Hitler, make it Mussolini. Springtime for Mussolini. Mussolini’s nicer.’ ‘Lew,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid you just don’t get it.’ So, finally, Joe Levine [head of Embassy Pictures] agreed to put up the other half of the money.” They had 40 days, a budget of $941,000, “and we couldn’t go a penny over,” Brooks recalls.

If Glazier was a producer, Joseph E. Levine was a mogul. Among other jobs, he’d been a scrap-iron dealer before turning himself into one of the most successful film producers and distributors of his day. At five feet four and more than 200 pounds, he described himself in one of his own press releases as “a colossus towering above the lesser moguls of filmdom.” Levine had made his fortune distributing Hercules and Hercules Unchained, beefcake pictures starring the muscle-bound Steve Reeves. “He bought Hercules for $120,000, swathed it in $1,156,000 worth of publicity . . . and grossed, so far, $20 million,” gushed the L.A. Times in 1966. But if his career began with Hercules, Godzilla, and Attila, by the mid-60s he had left most of the schlock behind and began backing art films. Joseph E. Levine Presents bought the North American distribution rights to Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women, starring Sophia Loren, after seeing only three minutes of the rushes. Through shrewd advertising and campaigning, he helped the sultry Italian star win an Academy Award for best actress—the first time anyone had won for a performance in a foreign language. Levine went on to produce or distribute Fellini’s 8 1/2, The Lion in Winter, Darling, A Bridge Too Far, The Graduate, and Carnal Knowledge.

Like Bialystock, Levine had learned to “flaunt it.” The rich and powerful mogul maintained legions of assistants (“He practically invented the personal assistant,” says Olsen), a 96-foot yacht, an estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a fabulous art collection.

Like Brooks and Glazier, the short, portly Levine had grown up poor and fatherless, the youngest of six children born to a Russian-immigrant tailor. “He had a funny office,” Olsen recalls. “There was a hallway that was paved to look like the street in Boston where he began [Billerica Street]. It was designed to make you—and him—never forget where he came from.” Levine once said that he couldn’t recall “one happy day growing up.” He had spent his childhood “hustling pennies as a shoeshine boy.” He also sold newspapers, lugged suitcases, drove an ambulance, and “manufactured little statues of Daddy Grace, a black evangelist.” Olsen saw in Levine the boy who never had a childhood: “He did magic tricks in his office. When you came in, he made a silver dollar stick to his forehead. It was kind of appealing, actually.”

Hertzberg recalls the first meeting between Levine and Brooks: “Levine was a child of the Depression, and in his office he kept a bowl of apples. So when Mel goes up to see him, Joe says, ‘Mel, my job is to get the money for you to make the movie. Your job is to make the movie. My job is to steal the money from you. And your job is to find out how I do it. Here, have an apple.’”

Once the deal was made, Levine asked, “Who do we get to direct?”

Without missing a beat, Brooks said, “Me. I know everything about this picture. I know where every character has to stand.” But Levine needed proof that he was up to it, so Brooks agreed to direct a commercial for Frito-Lay, with Olsen as casting director and Gene Wilder appearing as a daredevil aviator, complete with white silk scarf.

It was a success, and Levine agreed to let Brooks direct, but under one new condition: he had to change the name of the movie. Springtime for Hitler had to go. “No Jewish exhibitor will put Springtime for Hitler on his marquee,” Levine told him. Brooks reluctantly changed the title to something Levine could live with: The Producers. It wasn’t as striking as the original, but it was more appropriate than most people would ever know—no more colorful team of producers could be found to mount a movie than Glazier and Levine.

Brooks never had anyone else in mind to play Max Bialystock but Zero Mostel.

Mostel, the rotund, rubber-faced comic actor—an inspired clown of Falstaffian proportions—had won three Tony Awards practically back-to-back for his performances in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in 1961, in Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1963, and—most famously—as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof in 1965, which had made him a Jewish icon. His friend the writer A. Alvarez once described him as “a galleon in full sail, laden with pleasure.” He was perfect for the part of the loud, grasping, overwhelming Bialystock, except for one little problem: he didn’t want to do it.

“What’s he talking about?” Mostel asked his wife. Mostel had never even seen the script. “His agent read it first and thought it was offensive, and he had kept it from him,” Karen explains. So Sidney gave the script to Kate, the former Kathryn Harkin from Philadelphia, a dancer and ex-Rockette.

Kate liked it, but still Mostel didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to follow up his role as the beloved Tevye by playing “a Jewish producer going to bed with old women on the brink of the grave.” But finally Kate persuaded him to take the role. “You son of a bitch,” Mostel told Brooks, “I’m gonna do it. My wife talked me into it.”

If Glazier and Brooks “were like cat and dog,” as Karen Glazier says, then with Mostel thrown into the mix, “there was a lot of yelling.”

“Zero Mostel was heaven and hell” to work with, Brooks recalls. “When in a good mood, he was cooperative. He would do seven takes and give me something ecstatic, something of joy . . . or lunacy. A year before, he was hit by a bus, so he would say, ‘My leg is killing me, I’m going home.’ I’d beg him to stay. . . . He’d say, ‘That’s it. Shut up. I’m going home. Fuck you.’ On one of the good days, Zero would get up on a chair and announce, ‘Coffee nearly ready,’ and he’d imitate a percolator. I mean, you would never get anything as glorious as Zero Mostel doing coffee! Or he would say, ‘No, fuck you, I’m going to do it as written.’ He was ebullient, sweet, creative, and impossible. It was like working in the middle of a thunderstorm. Bolts of Zero—blinding flashes of Zero!—were all around you.”

Indeed, Mostel’s injury was serious enough to threaten to derail shooting on a number of occasions. In January of 1960 he had stepped out of a New York City cab and was struck by a bus, shattering his left leg. Despite numerous operations, the injury would plague him for the rest of his life.

Mostel was often difficult on the set, but the day they shot the trial scene at 60 Centre Street he seemed especially agitated and unwilling to work. No one knew why. It dawned on Hertzberg some 30 years later that the courthouse was the problem. “It was the blacklist. It colored everything for him,” he says.

Mostel had been listed in Red Channels, a compilation of 151 alleged subversives, which began circulating among studios in Hollywood in the early 1950s. One of his cabaret creations, a blustery, know-nothing southern senator called Polltax T. Pellagra (“What the hell was Hawaii doing in the Pacific Ocean, anyway?”), had attracted the attention of southern conservatives. On October 14, 1955, Mostel was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had refused to name names by invoking the Fifth Amendment, which meant he remained blacklisted, and the unproven taint of subversiveness clung to him. As a result, he did not work in films for more than 10 years. Showing up at the Federal Courthouse on Centre Street must have stirred up bitter memories of his testimony before HUAC.

Gene Wilder had never set out to become a comic actor. He had trained in the Method. It was Anne Bancroft who brought him to her husband’s attention. “He was in [Bertolt Brecht’s] Mother Courage and Her Children with Anne,” Brooks recalls, “and I met him backstage, and he was complaining that they were laughing at his serious performance. He couldn’t understand it. ‘Because you’re funny!’ I told him. ‘Gene, you’re funny. Get used to it. Go with what works!’ Then, three years later, he was in Luv, the Murray Schisgal play, and he was great in it. And I went to his dressing room and threw the script of The Producers on the desk and said, ‘There it is. You are Leo Bloom. You didn’t think I forgot, did you?’ And he burst into tears.”

The comedic actress Renée Taylor, recently seen as Fran Drescher’s wisecracking mother on television’s The Nanny, was appearing with Wilder in Luv when Brooks went to see the show. “He saw me, and that’s how I got to be in the movie” (in an all-too-brief comic turn as Eva Braun), Taylor recalls over lunch at Kate Mantilini in Los Angeles. “I knew Gene Wilder. I was in Lee Strasberg’s class with him. His name [then] was Jerome Silberman, and he was very shy. He was such a stickler for the Method—but talk about not being funny!” When Brooks approached him for The Producers, Wilder had just made his film debut as a hysterical undertaker in Bonnie and Clyde. “Gene was amazing in it,” says Hertzberg. “He kind of invented that role of the hysteric.”

Perhaps hysteria—and its opposite, repression—came easily to Wilder. When he was a six-year-old in Milwaukee, his mother, a pianist, had a heart attack. From then on, he lived in fear that if he got her excited she might die of another one. “I had to hold back everything all the time,” he remembered, “but you can’t hold back without paying a big price.”

There was one enormous obstacle to casting Wilder in the part of Leo Bloom: Brooks had promised Mostel that Wilder would read for the part. But Wilder hated to audition—he was practically psychotic on the subject. Wilder confessed to his psychiatrist that he really wanted the part, and that he believed if he were turned down he would spend the rest of his life as a character actor. “You see,” he said, “I knew Leo Bloom could make me a star.” After reading Brooks’s script, he recognized that he was “exactly at the same stage of life as Leo. . . . Bloom was a man ready to bloom, a man who changes dramatically when he meets his catalyst, Max Bialystock.” Reluctantly, he agreed to audition for Mostel.

“I went up the elevator and my heart was pounding,” Wilder recalled to Jared Brown, Mostel’s biographer. “I knock at the door. There’s Mel and Sidney and Zero. Zero gets up and walks toward me, and I’m thinking, Oh God, why do I have to go through this again? I hate auditions, I hate them. Zero reached out his hand as if to shake hands, and then put it around my waist and pulled me up to him . . . and gave me a big kiss on the lips, and all my fear dissolved.”

Wilder may have been Brooks’s first choice, but another Off Broadway actor, who was getting good reviews in Ronald Ribman’s Journey of the Fifth Horse, was also a possibility: Dustin Hoffman.

After they all caught his performance, “Dustin came back with us to Mel’s apartment,” Olsen recalls. “Mel and Anne lived on 11th Street, in a town house. Sidney liked Dustin really a lot.” But after reading the script, Dustin wanted to play Liebkind, the addled Nazi playwright. “But of course that was impossible; nobody wanted him to be the German,” remembers Olsen.

And then, one night, Brooks recalls, “someone woke me up, throwing pebbles at the window. ‘It’s me, it’s Dusty.’ ‘What do you want?’ I said. ‘I can’t read Franz Liebkind,’ he said. ‘I’m going to L.A. to audition for Mike Nichols to be in a movie with your wife.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘you’re a mutt. They’re going to get a better-looking guy for the part—you’ll be back, and the part will be waiting for you.‘”

But Hoffman got the role he auditioned for—that of a disaffected college student who’s seduced to the sounds of Simon & Garfunkel by an older woman, played, ironically, by Anne Bancroft, then just 37. The movie was The Graduate and it made Hoffman a star. “It’s a good thing he went,” says Brooks, “for him, and for The Producers, because we got that genius Kenneth Mars.”

At the time, Mars was probably the most sought-after actor in television commercials. “I was doing a lot of commercials, and I’d always wind up going down Broadway. I would see Mel on my rounds, and he would stop me and say, ‘I’m writing this great picture and you’re in it, and you’re going to be fantastic,’ and so on. Finally, he sent me a script,” Mars recalls. “The part he wanted me to play was the gay director, Roger De Bris. . . . I was playing a sort of gay psychiatrist [in a show called Best Laid Plans],and Mel loved that character.”

Mars came in to audition, but he announced, “‘Well, De Bris is a good part, but I’m not playing it. I’m playing the German.’ ‘No you’re not,’ Mel said. ‘Yes I am.’ ‘No you’re not.’ ‘Yes I am.’” Mars was called in three times to read; at last, Olsen said, “Hire him, he’s terrific.”

It was Mars’s first film role, and he was thrilled. But he quickly came up against Brooks’s stubborn control of every aspect of the movie. When Mars suggested putting pigeon droppings on Liebkind’s Nazi helmet (after all, he keeps birds—“doity, disgusting . . . boids”), Brooks resisted. He finally gave in, but then the two men haggled over how many droppings. They settled on four.

Brooks did not want his actors to improvise lines—or add pigeon droppings—but Mars is proud of some beauties he contributed that made it all the way to the Broadway incarnation: “Churchill . . . and his rotten paintings. The Fuhrer. Here was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in von afternoon—two coats!”

For the eight weeks of shooting, Mars lived in his costume—stained suspenders; ratty, military-issue woolen underwear; a Nazi helmet. “That may have set Zero off, I think,” Mars says. “In the beginning it was O.K., because I told him how much I admired him—I had seen him in Ulysses in Nighttown, in which he was brilliant—and he said, ‘Oh, thank you, my boy, thank you, dear boy . . . ’

“Then I got my first laugh from the crew,” Mars remembers, “and I was in trouble from Zero. Anyway, my smelling to high heaven may have [reminded] Zero of some less-than-fun days.” Mars’s ability to stay in character throughout the entire shoot also made a deep impression on Wilder, who later admitted, “I didn’t know if the character Kenneth Mars was playing was crazy or if Kenneth Mars was crazy.”

‘It wasn’t a studio film,” remembers Hertzberg. “There was no one to call if you needed more money, so the guys who were trained in New York had a certain way of getting things done. We made The Producers for $941,000, not $942,000. There wasn’t the extra thousand. Forty days in New York, and that was it.” That was a challenge Hertzberg could live with. In 1967 he was a good-looking, dark-haired kid who smoked a pipe to make himself look older.

Shooting for The Producers began on May 22, 1967, at the Production Center at 221 West 26th Street, “somewhere between Cuba and the Dominican Republic,” Hertzberg recalls, “also known as the Hy Brown Studios,” owned by two brothers. “These were the two cheapest guys who ever lived. In the wintertime, you couldn’t knock on the pipes [to get heat]. But every day there would be fresh flowers. I went over to Mendy [Brown] and said, ‘Mendy, you’re the cheapest guy I ever met in my life. How do you have fresh flowers in the studio every day?’ He said that when Hy, his brother, comes in from Long Island, he stops at the cemetery, picks up the flowers, and brings them into the studio. From graves.”

At first there was camaraderie on the set. Olsen recalls that “after the day’s shoot, we would see the dailies, and then we went to [hipster hangout] Max’s Kansas City for dinner every night.” Even Mostel, with his bad leg, would make it to Max’s, where he would greet the drag queens with a sloppy kiss on the lips.

It wasn’t long, however, before Brooks’s lack of experience, the pressure of directing his first movie, and his need for utter control of all aspects of filmmaking took its toll on cast and crew. “The first thing Brooks said when he got on the set was ‘Cut!’” Hertzberg recalls. “No,” he explained to Brooks, “wait a minute—first you say ‘Action,’ and when you’re done you say ‘Cut.’ It was that rudimentary. We all just stood around waiting for him to say something.”

“By the end of the first morning on the set, Mel was already becoming jittery,” according to Ralph Rosenblum, the film’s editor (who died in 1995), in his 1979 book, When the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins. Rosenblum was beginning to wonder if Brooks was prepared for the differences between television and film. “Did he know that in the movies you could shoot only about five minutes of usable film in a day? . . . Brooks couldn’t stand the waiting, and his impatience quickly extended to the cast. He soon found himself in a head-on conflict with the mountainous Mostel. The first time the star couldn’t perform with just the inflection Brooks wanted, the entire project seemed to be slipping from the director’s grasp. After several faulty takes, he started to shout, ‘Goddamn it, why can’t you . . . ’ But Mostel turned his head like a roving artillery gun and barked, ‘One more tone like that and I’m leaving.’ ”

Soon, the two men headed enemy camps. “‘Is that fat pig ready yet?’ Mel would sputter, and Mostel would say, ‘The director? What director? There’s a director here?’” recalled Rosenblum.

“There were no camps,” Hertzberg says in response to Rosenblum’s characterization. “Zero didn’t have a camp. Zero was the camp. [Mel and Zero] didn’t get along that well. For one thing, Zero had it in his contract that he didn’t have to work past 5:30 if he didn’t want to, because of his bad leg. And he used that a lot. Zero had a huge problem with authority.”

Hertzberg realized Brooks’s lack of experience when he saw that he had no idea where to put the camera. But Hertzberg did. “So when the cameraman Joe Coffey gave Mel a lot of crap, because Coffey didn’t understand the comedy, I was able to interpret. After the first few days, when we saw the rushes, the actors looked like they were standing on stumps . . . cut off at the ankles.” Coffey finally blew his cool. “You can’t do that! It’s not cinematic!” he shouted. They had to reshoot, and that was the end of the camaraderie between Brooks and Coffey.

Brooks continued to goad Mostel on the set, trying to get the “blinding flashes of Zero” that he needed to illuminate his movie. Olsen saw that “the really terrible part was that Mel had insomnia. Mike Hertzberg was just carrying him around.” Glazier noticed that Brooks was “gray with fatigue” by the end of the day.

The film took eight weeks to shoot and months to edit, with Brooks fighting Rosenblum on every cut. When, halfway through shooting, Rosenblum ran the first 20 minutes of edited film at the MovieLab screening room, Brooks bulldozed his way to the front of the room, planted himself in front of the screen, and faced Rosenblum and Glazier. As Rosenblum recalled, “Brooks growled . . . ‘I don’t want you to touch this fuckin’ film again! You understand? . . . I’ll do it all myself. Don’t touch it until I finish shooting!’”

Rosenblum was deeply shaken by the tirade. Driving back home to New Rochelle, he gave Glazier a lift, and the two men sat in the car in stunned disbelief. Glazier finally blurted out, “I don’t know why Mel has to do this. Why does he have to make it so difficult?”

One day a young writer for The New York Times named Joan Barthel arrived on the set to write a feature on the making of The Producers. Glazier was delighted; what they needed was good publicity, but, to Glazier’s horror, Brooks went out of his way to be offensive. “What the fuck do you want?” he barked at Barthel. “What do you want to know, honey? Want me to tell you the truth? Want me to give you the real dirt? Want me to tell you what’s in my heart?” At first Barthel thought this was a put-on, part of Mel Brooks’s shtick; then it dawned on her that she was being attacked. “Throughout much of the morning, on the set,” she later wrote, “as he hurled vivid invective at one of his staff people, and sarcasm at a visiting photographer . . . he had seemed—well, cranky.”

Glazier picked his way through some cables to rescue the hapless writer, and introduced himself, adding, “They call me the producer. Pray for me.” What should have been found gold—free publicity—turned into a nightmare for Glazier. The article ran with an unflattering photograph of Brooks in midtirade, the portrait of a man losing his grip.

Then, several weeks into the shooting, Brooks banned Glazier from the set. Glazier obliged; his nerves were frazzled, and he was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. But eventually he returned, anyway.

And yet. Despite all the murderous complaints, despite the temper tantrums, despite the insomnia and the insecurity (or perhaps because of them), Brooks got inspired performances from all his actors, including Mostel, whose best work up to that point was generally considered to have happened onstage, in live theater. “Zero was a very old-fashioned kind of performer,” Olsen says. “Film was not his medium. He didn’t have a clue. But what he did on The Producers was quite nice; it was always the lowest take, the take with the least volume, the most human take, that was chosen.” Film is a medium which rewards subtlety; critics tend to prefer Wilder’s hysterical sweetness to Zero’s histrionics. Yet The Producers is probably Mostel’s best captured performance, the one that will be remembered by posterity.

The Playhouse Theatre on West 48th Street in Manhattan was the actual set for Springtime for Hitler, the musical-within-the-movie. (It was demolished in 1969.) On Monday, June 25, 1967, the entire company moved into the theater.

Word had spread among actors that they were casting Hitlers. Olsen recalls, “The tenor from [the Frank Loesser musical] The Most Happy Fella came in with a guy from Fiddler on the Roof. They were Broadway guys. They didn’t want to tell me, because they thought it would turn me off. But, no, I hired them. Agents called for people who had leads in Broadway shows. John Cullum’s agent called, but we couldn’t use him.”

Charles Rosen, The Producers’ set designer, recalls, “We chose the theater because we needed the alley [for scenes that were eventually cut]. It was four blocks down from Rockefeller Center. There used to be a drugstore there, in the lobby, with a counter. The actors dressed as SS officers would walk down Sixth Avenue in their uniforms,” complete with Nazi armbands and polished boots. The sight of dozens of actors dressed as Hitler, taking their lunch break in a coffee shop in Rockefeller Center, caused a near riot, according to Rosen.

All the other scenes were filmed on location whenever possible. It was Olsen’s idea to use the Revson Fountain at Lincoln Center. They were looking for a place to film the moment when Bloom agrees to become Bialystock’s partner in crime. Olsen was at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, researching possible songs to use during the audition scene, when she walked past the Revson Fountain. “I thought, This is kind of good. We could use the fountain.”

It was the last scene they shot, but they almost didn’t finish it, because Mostel and Brooks were so furious with each other that Mostel was threatening to walk off the picture for good. Glazier was at the dentist when he heard, and, with his mouth bloody, he rushed over to Lincoln Center. He succeeded in getting Brooks and Mostel to tolerate each other long enough to finish the movie. “Something about the water made Zero angry,” Glazier later said.

Around 5:30 in the morning on July 15, 1967, the fountain came to life in the predawn light. Hertzberg recalls, “If you look at that wonderful scene where the fountain comes up, look above and see what color the sky is. It was dawn. We shot all night. We just had enough darkness left to do it, but it was a blue sky, not black. Then we went down to Chinatown for breakfast, like we used to do. It’s a memorable scene.”

“It was a long night,” Olsen remembers. “It was wet and slippery, but Gene Wilder ran around the whole fountain,” celebrating his decision to seize the day. It’s the “I want everything I’ve ever seen in the movies!” scene, the cri de coeur straight from Mel Brooks through his alter ego Leo Bloom.

Too bad the movie bombed. The earliest screenings were held in late November in a small theater in suburban Philadelphia. “There was no promotion, minimal advertising,” recalls Olsen. “It would follow *Helga, An Outstanding Film of Childbirth—*no one under 13 admitted.” At one screening, there were only about 38 people in the theater, including a bag lady and Joe Levine and some of his people from Embassy Pictures, who had taken limos down from New York. But it soon became apparent there was something wrong. Nobody was laughing. Levine turned to Glazier and said, “You and Brooks are full of shit. You lied to me. Stick this picture up your ass.” He pointed to the bag lady in the audience and said, “Look, even she fell asleep.”

It’s possible that Levine really didn’t like the picture, but in truth he had something else up his sleeve. He had already decided to put his resources behind another movie that was already being talked about—The Graduate. To add insult to rivalry, it had been written by Brooks’s co-creator on *Get Smart—*Buck Henry. Like many of the old-time moguls, Levine could smell a hit, and that hit was going to be The Graduate, not The Producers. The Producers finished its three weeks in Philadelphia and limped into New York.

But just as it seemed the movie would be buried and forgotten, Peter Sellers saw it, almost by accident. While in Los Angeles making Paul Mazursky’s I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Sellers had organized a movie club— with dinner—and the night they were supposed to see Fellini’s I Vitelloni, it couldn’t be found to accompany the spaghetti Bolognese that had been prepared by Mazursky’s wife. So the projectionist ran The Producers instead. Sellers loved it. That same night, he called Levine back East, waking him up at two A.M. to say The Producers is “a masterpiece, Joe!” Three days later, Sellers paid for a full-page ad in Variety: “Last night I saw the ultimate film,” it began. When the movie opened in New York, Sellers took out another full-page ad, in The New York Times. The movie broke box-office records at the Fine Arts Theatre that first week.

But it didn’t go over well in the provinces. “It didn’t make a lot of money, ever,” Brooks says. “I mean, it played in the big cities, but would people in Kansas understand about raising 1,000 percent to put on a Broadway show?” Hertzberg agrees. “It was only accepted among Jews! If you went to Des Moines, forget it.”

And then there were the reviews. Some critics found the movie hilarious, but most objected to what they saw as tasteless. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “That’s not screenwriting; it’s gagwriting.”

“Renata Adler [of The New York Times]— she was the worst,”Brooks remembers, still wincing. “I never thought black comedy of this dilute order could be made with the word or idea of Hitler in it anywhere. . . . I suppose we will have cancer, Hiroshima, and malformity musicals next,” she wrote.

Brooks was very depressed. “I remember telling Annie, my wife, ‘They thought it was in bad taste. It’s back to television. It’s back to Your Show of Shows.’”Sellers’s rave—though it didn’t make The Producers a hit—may have influenced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to award Brooks an Oscar for best original screenplay (after all, it was always about the words), but the award didn’t bring him many offers, because the film didn’t make any money. His second movie, The Twelve Chairs, came out two years later and crashed. So he went back to wandering the streets of New York, nearly broke, when one day he ran into David Begelman, then an agent at Creative Management Associates. Begelman “brought him out of the desert. He even had a new father figure to replace Sidney,” Hertzberg says. “Blazing Saddles [in 1974] came out of that meeting—another script, another idea that can’t miss. Lucky for Mel, it didn’t. He made a fortune. The checks are still coming in for that one.”

Although The Producers was not commercially successful, over the years it began to acquire cult status. Lines of dialogue and phrases from the movie started cropping up in the language, such as “creative accounting” and “When you’ve got it, flaunt it” (which appeared in a Braniff Airways advertisement as the caption to a photograph of Andy Warhol seated next to boxer Sonny Liston).

With the musical Brooks has come full circle, back to Broadway. “Thirty-five years later, it’s a hit on Broadway—it has a new life now,” Brooks says in his office in Beverly Hills, where the desk, the pens, the canisters of film, and the ashtrays are most definitely all his. “The Producers is like Halley’s comet,” he says. “It’ll have a metamorphosis, like Ovid. I’m proud of it. After all, it started out as a title.”

Hertzberg says, “Brooks owns 25,000 percent of the musical. Well, not really, but he’s pretty heavily invested in it; he owns a very large piece. After all, he did write the book, the songs, and he’d play all the parts if he could.”

This may be just the beginning of Brooks’s third act in show business; plans are under way to bring Young Frankenstein to Broadway. As Hertzberg says, “Brooks is hoping to live forever.”

Before his death, in December of 2002, Sidney Glazier watched as Brooks, on television, accepted a record-breaking number of Tony Awards—12—for the Broadway incarnation of The Producers. Like Kenneth Mars, Glazier stayed away from the Broadway musical of The Producers, and the movie’s set designer, Charles Rosen, has yet to see it. But Gene Wilder did go and, according to a friend, “is all right with it.”

“I called my father,” Karen says, “after Mel swept the Tony Awards and thanked him in his acceptance speech. He told me over the telephone, ‘He’s not a very nice person. He doesn’t deserve any of this.’ If my father had been 20 years younger, and the musical of The Producers had happened, he might have fought for a piece of it. He might have made a stink. In fact, I’m sure of it. But he was already old and living apart from all that. He just didn’t see the point anymore.”

A half-hour after talking to his daughter, Glazier got a call from Mitch congratulating him on being mentioned at the Tony Awards. “All of a sudden,” Mitch recalls, “the big voice was back. He’d had time to think things over.”

“The son of a bitch owes me money,” Glazier yelled into the phone, a producer to the end.